In my review of "The Beast with a Billion Backs", the Futurama movie before this one, I mentioned that I hope the next one is leaps and bounds above it as I was quite disappointed with that attempt. Well, luckily, the team smoked this one out of the park!
The humour is laugh outloud, which as most fans will know, isn't often the case with Futurama. The series often depends on hidden commentary that makes you go "Hey, that's totally true!" as opposed to making you spew milk out your nose. The laughs in "Bender's Game" come from slick dialogue with lines carrying over eachother with witty throwaways, worthy of Robert Downey Jr.
The first hour is almost purely standard fare until the fantasy genre kicks in, in a very poorly explained plot collision. Any fans of Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings will get a kick out of the fantasy aspect of the story with simple references to the LOTR collapsing staircases and changes "Orks" to "Morks" (raging zombie Robin William's that won't stop mumbling).
There is good use of all the standard characters but Zap and Kif fans can steer clear as they do not appear in this film (aside from a photo of Zap). Little Nibbler gets the star treatment as much of the basic plotline revolves around his dark matter poo. Just like in the previous movie, Bender spends most of the time off in his own sub-plot, which is much funnier than the one in "...Billion Backs" and Professor Zoidberg gets treated like the worthless slob he is. "Mom" is the main villain and it's always nice for long-time fans to learn new sidenotes on the decades long on-again-off-again romance between her and Professor Farnsworth. So much happens in a Futurama story I'm not going to ramble on about this scene or that scene but merely suggest this one's worth owning to watch every few months.
